Reading Stalin's Secret Police Files of the Executed

by Hiroaki Kuromiya

Hiroaki Kuromiya is the author of The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale University Press, Dec. 2007).

Stalin once said: "Death solves all problems. No man, no problem."
The statement may be apocryphal, but a belief of this kind clearly
guided his belief and action throughout his life. Stalin was critical
of the sixteenth-century Muscovite tyrant Ivan The Terrible who,
according to Stalin, was not resolute enough: Ivan "executed someone
and then he felt sorry and prayed for a long time. God hindered him in
this matter. Tsar Ivan should have been even more resolute."

God did
not hinder the atheist Stalin. Once reviewing a list of people to be
executed, Stalin said to himself: "Who's going to remember all this
riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names
now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one.... The people
had to know he was getting rid of all his enemies. In the end, they
all got what they deserved." Stalin was certain that he condemned the
"riff-raff" to oblivion by executing them. Yet, ironically, the
"riff-raff" left their voices in their police case files which were
composed precisely to justify their executions. In my recent book,
The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s, I seek
to demonstrate that the executed can be
heard from by reading with care the case files buried deep in the former Soviet archives.

We know that the vast bulk of people (in fact nearly everyone)
executed under Stalin (at least at the time of the Great Terror of
1937-38) were innocent of the crimes of which they were accused
(foreign espionage, terrorism, anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation
and the like). No material evidence was presented and no legal
procedure was followed (they were executed extra-judicially). Nearly
one million people were believed to have been executed in
1937-38. Stalin kept the records of the executed. Many confessed to
their crimes and were executed, whereas a relatively few adamantly
denied the charges. All the same they, too, were executed. Stalin's
secret police had every reason to show that the country was full of
enemies of the Soviet Union. The police were happy to beat
self-incriminating confessions out of the arrested. A lover of
history, Stalin was eager to lead future historians astray by
demonstrating, through such confessions, how pervasive his political
"enemies" were and that they had to be destroyed.

In The Darkness at Noon (1940), Arthur Koestler offered an
explanation of the mechanism of self-confession in the person of
Rubashov (modelled after Nikolai Bukharin, one of Stalin's archenemies
who was condemned in a show trial and executed in 1938). Koestler
imagined that Bukharin followed the Stalinist logic of sacrificing
fellow communists to the larger cause of the revolution and the
survival of the revolutionary regime in the face of Nazism. None of
this can be seen in the case files of the executed I have
examined. These were all "ordinary" Soviet citizens (workers,
peasants, teachers, housewives, priests, beggars, ballerinas,
musicians and the like). Their main concern was survival and not
revolution. Reading their case files is difficult and tricky. Many did
in the end confess to the alleged crimes, some were so scared by the
arrest and the threat of retribution that they signed, without
resistance, the interrogation documents prepared by the police. Still
many did resist and refused to confess. Even then most were tortured
into confessions.

Perusing the case files, I realized the best way to make sense of the
"confessions" was to compare the raw interrogation records (written
longhand) with the typescript documents used to inform the higher-ups
and indict the arrested. In many cases, the records of initial denials
were often withdrawn by the police from the case files, but in some
cases they were not. This may have been due to police oversight, but
the police at the time probably did not imagine that historians would
read the files decades later. By focusing on raw, handwritten
documents, I came to understand well the mechanism of interrogation --
the extraction of confessions through threat and torture and the
outright falsification of evidence in the Stalinist torture
chambers. Reading these handwritten documents was difficult and
time-consuming, but I was hooked on it and worked laboriously, because
I began to hear in them the agonized voices of the executed. They were
not the survivors. They were the executed. It was an extraordinarily
rewarding experience, even if it was simultaneously ghastly, painful,
and sobering. I felt compelled to let the dead speak -- those
"ordinary" Soviet citizens who had been condemned, as Stalin expected,
to complete oblivion.

A few examples may be revealing. Vera Goroshko was a 23-year-old
ballerina in Kyiv, Ukraine. She was accused of being a Polish spy and
was executed in 1937. The typed bill of indictment claimed that she
confessed to her crime. Yet the handwritten interrogation records show
that she denied the charges consistently. All the same she was
executed. A perusal of her file shows that she fell in love with a
Polish diplomat (Wiktor Zaleski) who was indeed a Polish intelligence
officer stationed in Kyiv. It seems to have been a true love affair
for Goroshko. For Zaleski, too, this may have been the case. Yet
Zaleski also appears to have used her for espionage without Goroshko's
knowledge, and, in turn, the Soviet secret police used Goroshko's
affair to force her to inform on the Poles in Kyiv. Even so, the
police did not trust her (because she was in love with a Pole) and in
the end destroyed her. There is nothing to support the allegation that
she was a Polish spy. Yet the Soviet police feared that Goroshko might
be. She proclaimed her innocence to the very end. The police claimed
that she confessed, but no confession is recorded or documented in her
case file.

In another case, Iadviga Moshinskaia was a 26-year-old
newspaper editor in Kyiv. Because she hailed from the family of a
Catholic (Uniate) priest, she was by default politically suspect in
the view of the Communist regime. Taking advantage of her background
which left her vulnerable, the police recruited her as an informer
(probably she could not refuse). Yet the police could not trust her
because she was politically suspect to begin with. In the end, she was
arrested and charged with being a member of a counter-revolutionary
Polish organization. As an informant for the police, she found the
charges ridiculous and denied them. Unable to force a confession, the
police then turned her police work on her: they accused her of
misinforming the police and protecting the "true enemies" of the
Soviet government from the police. Whether torture was used is not
known, but Moshinskaia was broken in the end, confessed to her
"crime," and was executed.

Perusing these and many other similar cases, one clearly hears the
voices of fear, agony, anger, resistance, despair and resignation from
people faced with execution. Even their forced silence often sounds
eloquent. These people were condemned to oblivion by Stalin for whom
their lives meant nothing. Ironically, Stalin's attempt to extinguish
their voices was the instrument that has preserved them, in the depths
of their case files. At least hundreds of thousands of similar files
are still waiting to be read in the archives throughout the former
Soviet Union.